2 ms·

What's a reactor game?

by Kiro 7y ago

willis936 7y ago
They’re a small class of game where you have a 2D cartesian grid where you can place heat sources, heat spreaders, and heat dissipators. The goal is to maximize heat production without melting down. The first instance I know of such a game is industrialCraft2’s nuclear reactor. You can play with it here. https://github.com/MauveCloud/Ic2ExpReactorPlanner/releases https://github.com/MauveCloud/Ic2ExpReactorPlanner/releases Nuclear reactors are fun because fuel cells are also neutron sources, so their heat output increases if you place them adjacent to each other. The allure of these games, to me, is a geometry playground where you can make your number bigger if you do a little mental math. The 2D grid nature limits complexity if you have simple rules and components, so the solution is to have more rules and components. ;) I know a fair bit about the tool set of these games just by spending many hours playing and thinking about them, but I’m not going to turn this post into a design document. I should write/publish one at some point so maybe fewer clumsy balance mistakes are made in future games. There are instances of games like this popping up. Some of them are low effort money grabs, but some are okay. https://www.reddit.com/r/incremental_games/comments/6jfuxq/list_of_incremental_games_by_archetype https://www.reddit.com/r/incremental_games/comments/6jfuxq/l... I have thoughts for solving the idle nature of the game by having diminishing returns on a design as time goes on (perhaps changing what metric a player wants to maximize) or by giving them complete control of the tick rate (this seems like a bad solution since some players may feel the urge to just idle anyway). I want to add in more fun designs, equivalent to multiblock structures in minecraft. Perhaps a fusion reactor that requires spending energy on confinement coils and heat injection.

2 ms·

What's a reactor game?

by Kiro 7y ago

What's a reactor game?

willis936 7y ago
They’re a small class of game where you have a 2D cartesian grid where you can place heat sources, heat spreaders, and heat dissipators. The goal is to maximize heat production without melting down. The first instance I know of such a game is industrialCraft2’s nuclear reactor. You can play with it here. https://github.com/MauveCloud/Ic2ExpReactorPlanner/releases https://github.com/MauveCloud/Ic2ExpReactorPlanner/releases Nuclear reactors are fun because fuel cells are also neutron sources, so their heat output increases if you place them adjacent to each other. The allure of these games, to me, is a geometry playground where you can make your number bigger if you do a little mental math. The 2D grid nature limits complexity if you have simple rules and components, so the solution is to have more rules and components. ;) I know a fair bit about the tool set of these games just by spending many hours playing and thinking about them, but I’m not going to turn this post into a design document. I should write/publish one at some point so maybe fewer clumsy balance mistakes are made in future games. There are instances of games like this popping up. Some of them are low effort money grabs, but some are okay. https://www.reddit.com/r/incremental_games/comments/6jfuxq/list_of_incremental_games_by_archetype https://www.reddit.com/r/incremental_games/comments/6jfuxq/l... I have thoughts for solving the idle nature of the game by having diminishing returns on a design as time goes on (perhaps changing what metric a player wants to maximize) or by giving them complete control of the tick rate (this seems like a bad solution since some players may feel the urge to just idle anyway). I want to add in more fun designs, equivalent to multiblock structures in minecraft. Perhaps a fusion reactor that requires spending energy on confinement coils and heat injection.